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Trusted Community Contributions

The concept of trusted community contributions is driven by user request, especially from larger organizations which want to use certain community extensions in "production" processes. The goal is that community contributions become more widely used and accepted as high-quality extensions to KNIME.

Trusted community contributions provide the following guarantees to users:

Backward compatibility, i.e. existing workflows will continue to work with newer version

Compliance with KNIME usage model and quality standards

Support (via forum) in case of problems

Maintenance for the last two KNIME versions

The trusted community contributions are readily available in KNIME's Update Manager starting with KNIME 2.9.

In order to fulfill the above guarantees, developers are required to satisfy the following items:

Test workflows for each node
Having a test workflow for each node will make it easier to detect compatibility breaks. These testflows are not necessarily full functional tests, because certain extensions already have testcases for the underlying libraries or binaries. However, the testflows should check common usage scenarios with which compatibility issues can be detected at an early stage. Untested nodes are detected and reported by the test system.

Compliance with Noding Guidelines
The official Noding Guidelines describe the expected behaviour of every KNIME node. All nodes should follow the guidelines in order to guarantee a smooth user experience. The Noding Guidelines come with a check list that every node should checked against. KNIME will perform regular cross-checks, but it is in the responsibility of the developers to ensure compliance.

Minimum SonarQube Rule Compliance
All contributions are automatically run through SonarQube. We expect every trusted community contribution to have a minimum rule compliance index (RCI) of at least 70%. This should ensure a certain level of code quality and maturity.

Release Notes/Changelog
Each project should maintain release notes and/or a changelog on its web page so that user's can easily get an overview of new features and fixed bugs.

Active and reliable contact
Each trusted project should have one or more active contact persons. They should react to requests from both users and KNIME within a reasonable amount of time (within 2-3 working days).

In order to become trusted, project owners have to actively contact us and provide all necessary evidence that the above requirements are fulfilled. We are happy to assist you in the process as much as possible. Once a project has become trusted, it will be re-evaluated before each new KNIME release. All community contributors will get previews of new KNIME releases several weeks before the anticipated release date so that there should be enough time for validation.